1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to providing print options for search engine results.
2. Discussion of Related Art
A search engine operates by “web crawling” and indexing various websites on the Internet and then searching for those websites when directed. In doing so, search engines store information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the html itself. These webpages are retrieved by via web crawling, which is an automated process of following every link on a website. The contents of each webpage are then analyzed to determine how they should be indexed. Data about the web pages is then stored in an index database for use in later queries by a user.
Indexing allows information to be found as quickly as possible. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages. The cached page generally retains the actual search text since it can be useful when the contents of a current page have been updated in a way that the search terms no longer exist. When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically using “key words”), the search engine examines its index and provides a listing of the best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text.
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another.
In most cases, the search engine presents a user with Internet search results in a list. The results may include links to web pages, images, documents, and other types of data. The contents may also be distributed over several pages that are traversed via links in the current search results page. Generally, the sizes of contents of these links are unknown. Accordingly, the user is not given enough information to decide whether or not to print a certain link without actually displaying the webpage(s) of a website. In this regard, a user may not wish to print a certain webpage without at least first reviewing the contents thereof (e.g., because a webpage may include hundreds of pages that the user does not wish to print).